Monthly Archives: February 2013

I don’t regret writing earlier today that the MSM would be turned off by Gene Sperling’s statement to Bob Woodward that he would regret some of his reporting on the sequester. But it looks like I may have erred in this prediction. Politico reports that some in the media reject Woodward’s claim that Sperling’s remark amounted to a threat. Among that group, interestingly enough, is Bret Baier of Fox News. »

The Hill reports that key House Republicans seem to be on board with their leadership’s plan to pass a six-month government-funding measure that would reflect the budget cuts from the sequester. The absence of such a measure would cause the government to shut down after March 27 when the current stopgap funding bill runs out. House Democrats are expected to oppose the resolution as a protest against the reduced level »

Normally, a mid-season NBA game between the Detroit Pistons and the Washington Wizards would be unworthy of comment, even by my offbeat approach to what’s interesting in sports. But there’s a lesson, albeit an unsurprising one, in last night’s game between these two lowly teams. With the Pistons leading 96-95 and time just about expired, the Wiz’s Trevor Ariza took a potentially game-winning shot from the corner. The shot tickled »

Specifically, to make sure that Joe Biden never, ever gets his hands on a firearm. Biden loves shotguns–nothing wrong with that, but it appears that every time he fires one, somebody’s life is in danger. Here is the latest: I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in »

For all of the liberal caterwauling about disparities in wealth, one thing I don’t understand is why no one, not even the socialist senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders in full bulging-neck-vein mode, has started channeling Huey Long and calling for a serious wealth tax. After all, even if you raise the top marginal income tax rate back up to the Krugman nirvana level of 91 percent, it won’t touch the »

Until very recently, I had a hard time imagining what it would take to get the mainstream media riled up about the Obama administration. After all, even the Benghazi horror failed to accomplish this. But the Bob Woodward flap has remedied my failure of imagination. Whatever the merit of Woodward’s specific charge that the White House, through Gene Sperling, threatened him, the controversy at a minimum has struck a nerve »

As Scott pointed out yesterday, Bob Woodward has thrust himself even further into the sequestration saga by complaining that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret” his comment that President Obama moved the goal post by asking for more revenue. Politico has presented what purports to be the email containing the threat, which was written by Gene Sperling. In context »

Apparently E.J. Dionne is not content with all the love we’ve sent his way here the last couple of days, and so today’s he’s descended to primal scream liberalism. In today’s column Dionne stamps his feet and demands, “This has to stop.” What has to stop? The permanent budget crisis, that’s what. But to repeat something said yesterday: I thought liberals liked crisis, because, pace the Crisis and Leviathan thesis, »

The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn devoted yesterday’s Daily Download (video below) to Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison’s shoutdown on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Tuesday evening. I wrote about it here. “This guy came on his show and then tried to filibuster it by yelling at him, saying ‘You’re a terrible journalist,’ ‘You’re the worst journalist,’ ‘You’re a Republican,’ ‘You’re awful,’” Ashburn said of Ellison’s appearance. »

here, that President Obama is winning the sequester battle but losing the war: The more time we spend on pointless disputes about budget cuts no one is expected to make soon, the less we spend trying to solve the problems that confront us today — and, God forbid, thinking about the future. The 2012 election gave President Obama new authority and new energy. Republicans want to place as much distance »

Jack Lew, the plutocrat nominated as Secretary of the Treasury by Barack Obama, was confirmed by the Senate this afternoon on a 71-26 vote. What was notable about the vote was not so much the outcome as the challenge that Senator Jeff Sessions threw down before his Democratic colleagues–try to defend Jack Lew, and if you can’t defend him, don’t vote for him. One thing is for certain: the Democrats »

Bob Woodward has been blowing the whistle on Obamaworld full of lies on the sequester, most recently over the weekend in a Washington Post column. It’s a great old-fashioned story in a number of respects, which was the point I tried to make in my Obamaworld post. In any event, it seems to have Woodward’s juices flowing. This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Woodward blasted Obama’s “madness” for letting budget »

From the apparent horror of the White House, you’d think March 1 was threatening castration rather than sequestration. And they might be right in a sense; as we’ve argued here before, Obama and the Democrats seem much more terrified of sequestration than Republicans for the simple reason that more of their key client groups depend on the discretionary programs that will be pinched in sequestration. Fiscal castration indeed. Will the »

Minnesota Fifth District Congressman Keith Ellison is a piece of work. He is a former member of the Nation of Islam who first ran for office as a Democrat in 1998 under the NOI name Keith Ellison-Muhammad. Sad but true. He’s a little bit hustler, a little bit thug, and a lot of Marxist claptrap wrapped with an Islamic overlay. Which branch of Islam is it that squares with equal »

Over the years, we have often had fun with the ignorance shown by reporters and editors of the New York Times with respect to literature, history, geography, and especially math and science, as reflected in the paper’s corrections section. Today’s corrections include a classic of the genre. It concerns this photo, which was part of an article about an environmental controversy in Maine: A picture caption on Saturday with an »

Andy McCarthy asks two good questions about the Republican “folderoo” on Chuck Hagel: I have a question for Senator John McCain, leader of the pack that says Hagel is “not qualified” to be defense secretary but that nonetheless voted in a way that assured his confirmation. McCain opposes the sequester because, he argues, the cuts to the defense budget are “unconscionable.” So . . . how can it be unconscionable »

From William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, we learn about the case of Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children: The Romeikes are devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German public schools. In the United States, the right to homeschool ones’ own children is accepted, although frequently mocked by the left. The homeschoool movement is thriving in »